Dealing With Food Allergies

Dealing with food allergies is a learning process. No matter if the allergy is severe, mild, or moderate, there’s a learning cure in understanding allergic triggers, how to avoid them, and what substitutes to use.

Unfortunately, it seems more and more people are allergic to foods that are very common and hard to avoid — eggs, milk, tree nuts, peanuts, fish, and shellfish. Children especially seem to have allergies to foods.

Try to learn as much as you can about the allergy you have –

Egg Allergy
If you have an egg allergy you are hypersensitive to foods containing the yolk or white. Nowadays, there are egg substitutes. You can also use apple sauce, tapioca, and potato starch.

Nut Allergy
Don’t confuse nut allergy with peanut allergy. Tree nuts are considered fruits. A good alternative would be soy nuts which are really beans.

Milk Allergy
Individuals who are sensitive to milk have trouble digesting the proteins in cow milk. You may be able to tolerate goat’s milk; otherwise, try soy milk, almond milk, or rice milk.

Seafood Allergy
Seafood allergy falls into two categories — mollusks (clams, mussels, oysters) and crustaceans (shrimp, lobster, crab). While the two groups are distantly related, there is a high rate of allergic cross reactivity between them. The only thing to do is avoid them completely.

With all the foods you have to avoid, it may seem you have nothing left to eat; however, that’s not true at all. Many specialty grocers fill the gap with a wide variety of nutritional food that tastes good but is without the allergic ingredients that cause a reaction.

It may be tempting to go ahead and eat your favorite food and just suffer through the aftermath, but you’re really doing harm to your body. One time too many and your body may not be able to compensate without emergency assistance.